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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Magento Infrastructure Architect

💰 $120,000 - $180,000

MagentoInfrastructureDevOpsCloudE-commerce

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking a seasoned Magento Infrastructure Architect to lead architecture and implementation of robust, scalable, and secure Magento 2 infrastructure for enterprise e-commerce. The ideal candidate owns cloud architecture and platform engineering for Magento, drives performance optimization (PHP-FPM, MySQL, Redis, Varnish, Elasticsearch), defines IaC and CI/CD standards (Terraform, Ansible, GitLab CI/Jenkins), and partners with SRE, platform, and development teams to ensure high availability, observability, security, and cost optimization. This role combines hands‑on engineering, technical leadership, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver world-class shopping experiences at scale.

Key SEO / LLM keywords: Magento 2, Magento Infrastructure Architect, AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Varnish, Redis, Elasticsearch, MySQL, PHP-FPM, CI/CD, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, Performance Optimization, High Availability, Observability, SRE.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer with e‑commerce/Magento experience
  • Platform Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) focused on PHP stacks
  • Technical Lead / Senior Cloud Engineer supporting Magento or LAMP stacks

Advancement To:

  • Head of Platform / Director of Infrastructure
  • Principal Architect (Cloud & E-commerce)
  • VP Engineering (E-commerce/Platform)

Lateral Moves:

  • E-commerce Technical Program Manager
  • Solutions Architect for agencies or consulting firms specializing in Magento
  • Cloud Architect (specializing in retail/e-commerce workloads)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design and own the end‑to‑end infrastructure architecture for Magento 2 and related services, including web, application, cache, search, database, queueing, and asynchronous processing to meet high availability and performance SLAs.
  • Lead cloud architecture decisions (AWS, GCP, Azure) for Magento deployments: select regions, VPC/subnet designs, networking, load balancing (ALB/NLB), and autoscaling strategies to support peak traffic and seasonal events.
  • Build and maintain containerized Magento platforms using Docker and Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS), including Helm charts, deployment strategies (blue/green, canary), and runtime configuration for PHP-FPM pools and PHP extensions.
  • Define and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards using Terraform, CloudFormation, and/or Pulumi for reproducible, version-controlled provisioning of Magento infrastructure.
  • Architect and optimize caching layers (Varnish, Redis) for full‑page cache, session storage, and rate-limiting to drastically reduce backend load and improve page times.
  • Design Elasticsearch clusters for product search and catalog performance, set up indexing strategies, shard/replica configurations, cluster monitoring, and upgrade/migration plans.
  • Optimize MySQL/MariaDB for Magento including schema tuning, query optimization, read replica architecture, failover, backups (logical & physical), point-in-time recovery, and capacity planning for growth.
  • Lead platform performance tuning for Magento application stack: PHP-FPM tuning, opcache configuration, Composer dependency management, Magento indexing strategy, and profiling with Xdebug Blackfire or New Relic.
  • Implement and enforce CI/CD pipelines for Magento code, deployment artifacts, database migrations, and static content deployment using GitLab CI, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions with automated testing and rollback capabilities.
  • Establish robust backup, disaster recovery (DR), and business continuity plans, including RTO/RPO targets, automated backups for code and databases, and documented recovery runbooks.
  • Define security hardening, patching, and compliance standards for Magento infrastructure: WAF rules, TLS/SSL configuration, secret management (Vault or cloud KMS), IAM policies, and vulnerability scanning.
  • Drive observability and monitoring: implement Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/Opensearch for logs, metrics, traces, and implement alerting and runbooks to lower MTTD/MTTR.
  • Create cost optimization strategies: rightsizing instances, reserved/spot instances, autoscaling policies, storage lifecycle management, and budget governance while meeting performance targets.
  • Lead on-premise to cloud or cloud-to-cloud migrations for Magento, planning lift-and-shift and re-architecture efforts while minimizing downtime and data loss.
  • Specify and enforce operational runbooks, incident management processes, on-call rotations, and post-incident reviews; act as an escalation point for critical e-commerce incidents.
  • Collaborate closely with Magento developers to identify architecture-related performance bottlenecks, propose code-level improvements, and prioritize engineering work for scalability.
  • Implement logging, tracing and correlation between Magento application logs, infrastructure logs, and third-party systems to accelerate root-cause analysis.
  • Evaluate, select, and integrate third‑party infrastructure and performance services (CDN, image optimization, edge caching, and global load balancers) to improve global UX and reduce latency.
  • Drive platform standardization and componentization to enable repeatable multi‑tenant or multi-store Magento deployments and reduce time-to-market for new storefronts.
  • Define APIs and contracts for platform services, developer self-service capabilities, and internal platform documentation to enable product teams to onboard quickly.
  • Mentor and lead infrastructure, DevOps, and SRE engineers, set architecture review processes, and encourage best practices in automation, observability, and secure operations.
  • Maintain vendor relationships and manage infrastructure-related procurement, licensing, and SLAs with cloud providers, managed hosting partners, and observability/security vendors.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Drive technical due diligence for e-commerce acquisitions and assess integration complexity for Magento platforms.
  • Provide platform usage metrics and recommendations to product and business stakeholders to guide feature prioritization and capacity planning.
  • Create detailed runbooks and knowledge base articles for operational tasks and regularly run platform health audits.
  • Assist in RFP responses and architecture sections for potential clients and partners where Magento infrastructure expertise is required.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep expertise with Magento 2 architecture, deployment models, Composer-based workflows, Magento CLI, cron and indexing behavior.
  • Proven experience architecting and operating Magento on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) including networking, security, and cost management.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS), Helm, and Kubernetes operator experience for stateful workloads.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (preferred), CloudFormation, Ansible, or Pulumi for reproducible environment provisioning.
  • Caching and session management: Varnish configuration/tuning, Redis (cluster and sentinel), HTTP cache invalidation strategies.
  • Search and catalog: Elasticsearch / OpenSearch cluster design, indexing strategies, and query performance tuning.
  • Database administration: MySQL/MariaDB tuning, replication, failover, backups, and high availability patterns for Magento workloads.
  • CI/CD and release engineering: GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or CircleCI with immutable artifact deployment and automated rollout strategies.
  • Observability & monitoring: Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/Opensearch, tracing (Jaeger/Zipkin) and log aggregation best practices.
  • Security, compliance, and identity: WAF, TLS, vulnerability scanning, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS), and IAM policies.
  • Performance engineering: profiling tools (Blackfire, Xdebug), page speed optimization, HTTP/2/3, CDN integration (CloudFront, Fastly), and front-end cache strategies.
  • Automation and scripting: Bash, Python, Ruby, or Go for automation, SRE tooling and operational workflows.
  • Backup & DR: Cross-region replication, snapshot management, point-in-time recovery and automated restore testing.
  • Networking & infra: Load balancing, autoscaling, VPC peering, VPN, and CDN/edge configurations for global traffic management.
  • Cost engineering: cloud cost analysis, rightsizing, reserved/spot instance strategies, and storage lifecycle policies.
  • Container storage & stateful services knowledge: persistent volumes, stateful sets, and operator-based database management.
  • Experience with Magento observability-specific instrumentation and business metrics for checkout, catalog, and search funnels.

(At least 10 of the above are core production skills typically pulled from real-world Magento infrastructure job descriptions.)

Soft Skills

  • Strong cross-functional communication with product, engineering, QA, and business stakeholders.
  • Leadership and mentorship skills: guide junior engineers and enforce architecture governance.
  • Problem solving under pressure: calm, analytical incident commander during on-call escalations.
  • Strategic thinking: translate business goals into resilient, scalable infrastructure designs.
  • Documentation and knowledge transfer: create clear runbooks, onboarding docs, and architecture diagrams.
  • Stakeholder management and vendor negotiation skills.
  • Continuous improvement mindset and data-driven decision making.
  • Time management and prioritization in fast-paced e-commerce release cycles.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in a technical discipline, or relevant cloud/vendor certifications (AWS Solutions Architect, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, CKAD/CKA, HashiCorp Certified).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Cloud Computing / DevOps

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12 years of experience in infrastructure/DevOps/Platform engineering, with at least 3–5 years specifically in Magento or large PHP e-commerce platforms.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years of infrastructure experience and 3+ years architecting and operating Magento 2 in production.
  • Demonstrated track record with cloud migrations, large-scale traffic events (Black Friday/Cyber Monday), and building resilient e-commerce platforms.
  • Hands-on experience leading cross-functional teams, establishing platform standards, and delivering measurable performance improvements.
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